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December 14, 2023,
As we close in on the end of the first semester, I cannot help but reflect on the beautiful and good things we have seen this year and how proud I am of our staff, students, and school. Over the course of the semester we have seen 11th and 12th graders perform Three Musketeers, Pride and Prejudice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Taming of the Shrew. The entire school came together for a truly magical performance of The Music Man. Early in December, our amazing vocal groups performed beautifully, including our faculty choir. The Scottsdale Prep athletic teams performed successfully and virtuously on the field, courts, pool, and tracks. Due to the reputation of our school and network, 88 colleges and universities visited Scottsdale Prep this semester in hopes of wooing our graduates to their school.
More remarkable than the litany of accomplishments from SPA students is this: nearly all our students were involved with more than one of these activities. This speaks to the well-rounded experience and the opportunities our curriculum provides. While many larger schools may provide many more “electives”, students who participate in a robust classical curriculum are pushed out of their comfort zones and thus grow in ways they would never have imagined or chosen for themselves.
A Scottsdale Prep education means that by the end of a scholar’s senior year, they would have acted in a Shakespearean play and another more modern play, sang in two choirs, taken two semesters of advanced art, a course on poetry, studied economics for a semester, been exposed to the beauty and complexity of calculus, immersed in a classical or modern language, and read much of the classical cannon from The Odyssey to Huckleberry Finn - spanning over 2,000 years of human history.
We are extremely proud of the intentional nature of the path we have laid out for our young scholars – comprising the best and most beautiful and consequential words, thoughts, ideas, music, and works of art. This is an experience that eschews the cafeteria-style approach to education that has eroded our common culture and has treated our children into empty vessels to be filled with facts and figures rather than truth, goodness, and beauty.
Sincerely,
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